Posts Tagged ‘font’

Taðýric finally has its own writing system. It took me a few tries to find something I liked, but finally I realized I need some sort of aesthetic commonalities between all these glyphs. The commonality I went with is a little radical, but none of the strokes are allowed to curve upwards. The result is something that looks to me like a lawn of twisted grass, or to others like rows of dancing ghosts.

The abugida is something of a cross between an abugida and a syllabary, as the glyphs for syllables with /e/ and /i/ as their nuclei are slightly irregular: Rather than consistent diacritics, certain strokes in the base glyph are doubled. I therefore needed to create both a font and a keyboard layout.

Here is the result!

This is my translation of Hávamál 93-95. I think it was worth the hours of effort.

I finally decided (tentatively) on a text to translate. It has a couple different persons, some neat moods and reflexivity, various places for case or adpositions to be applied, and a little aspect (but no tense). It also happens to just be a really nice few verses.

I’ve gone ahead and translated it, and then also typed it out in the latest version of the Sehali script.

I’ve been commissioned by Elmer Johnson to create a language for a novel he is intending to write. We are collaborating on it, and thusfar it has a diphthong-heavy phonology and a relatively regular abugida. Have a look.

So a week or two ago, I spent sixteen hours straight (that’s right: not even a bite to eat or a sit to poop) in a flurry of creativity to create the Sehali alphabet. It’s my first completely original alphabet in a rather long time, and it’s quite complex, working as a kind of composed syllabary, like hangul (Korean script). I’ve got it working nicely in tandem with the keyboard layout, which has changed a little to accommodate it. Don’t worry, though: it’s still full of all those dots and macrons and diaereses and circumflexes above and below everything to make it look like some sort of weird topsy-turvy agglutinating Vietnamese when written in Latin. I’m only just now writing a blog post about it, and the language still has a slim vocabulary, but I’ll celebrate by translating this blog’s title into my new lizardy script:

There is a phenomenon one tends to experience when he or she reconstructs fictional pseudo-conlangs or incomplete conlangs into working conlangs: often times, you aren’t the only one doing it. This can be both a problem and a boon: a problem because it means there are different people with different interpretations who disagree with you and if you’re overly competitive like I am you feel like you are vying for some sort of conlang control, with the goal being the fanbase adhering strictly to your reconstruction; and a boon because you can collaborate with people if you can get over your competitive ego.

I am going to attempt to do exactly that. About a year ago, Ra’Zakhar & Kiarash began work on what they have dubbed The Ta’agra Project. They’ve been nice enough to credit me on their front page, but they have also taken some deviations from my rendition of the Khajiiti language, and have added many of their own words to the Ta’agra lexicon. Despite this, we believe we can work together, so expect to see more and more Ta’agra coming that should, WITH OUR POWERS COMBINED, become that sought-after be-all of a fan language.

Sure, Justin, you always say you will be working on things, but what have you actually done? Well, I’m glad you asked. Apart from my struggles to convince my new collaborators that Ta’agra has case prefixes (the evidence just keeps pouring in, come on, guys!), one major stride these two have taken is to start on an alphabet. Now, I’m not too fond of alphabets: they’re rare in the real world and because of this they take the immersion right out of a conlang. But these two have an interesting philosophy that I often forget to include, and that is that this is a fan language. A language for fans. Not for linguists, not for the .01% of people in the world who would consider writing songs in Na’vi, but for people who like the Elder Scrolls franchise and think it would be neat to be able to, say, write their own name in Ta’agra. They’re not going to be able to do that if it’s done in an abugida (much as it pains me), so an alphabet it is.

And to show my good intentions, I have started on a font for said alphabet based on the glyphs they already invented with a couple modifications and additions of my own. It’s just got the letters so far, but check it out.

Since I now have my own webspace, I can finally reliably upload the fonts and keyboard layouts I create. I use Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator for layouts, and HighLogic Font Creator for my fonts, and I’m proud of each and every one of them and have already included my Mésylþo keyboard layout and Asuran font.

I’m posting because I just decided to add a combination of font and keyboard layout for perhaps the most famous conceptualized language: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sindarin. Sindarin uses Tengwar as a writing system, which is an abugida — that is, each letter is made up of two parts: a consonant and a vowel, with the vowel in the form of a diacritic. It was therefore a lot of work to put every single syllabic glyph into the font as well as to set all the dead keys needed for the keyboard layout, but it does work, despite having been made back in 2009.

So, for those of you out there who really wish Elvish had Unicode representations, this is probably the next-best thing, and lets you type Sindarin using Tengwar (almost) just as you would type the romanization. Have fun!